>>Well, even for an anecdote it's a bit light on information. Basically
>>all I know now is that someone with better qualifications than you said
>>something that you apparently very much disagreed with. [...]>

> > Yes, except (as I forgot to say) that 'the name' changed 'its' mind > after reading the other two reviews of the paper.

Ok. That is indeed interesting.

> The reason I am light > on information is that I am not sure about the ethics of giving the > names of the people involved. Or details of the paper, for that matter.

Actually you already stepped the line a bit. Telling us any more would
be clearly over it.

> But never mind. My point was just that even respected scientists may be > blind to the reinvention of wheels, especially if the technology names > are changed and steeped in hype.

Oh yeah. No doubt about that.

>>>So it is a renaissance of the network model?
>>
>>Well, if you want to call it that. But as I said, that name has all
>>kinds of connotations that would not be justified. The data model would
>>be more expressive. The constraint language would be very different. The
>>query language would be very different. The update language would be
>>very different. View definitions would be different. The way that
>>queries would be optimized would be very different. Concurrency control
>>would be different. These are not trivial things. They matter.

> > Of course they matter. I'm just wondering why all this would be > different. Just the advent of new and better brains since the > sixties/seventies, or other developments of computer science?

The progress of science. We now know more and understand certain
problems better.

>>>Ok ... but I though half the point of OODBs was to lessen the "impedance
>>>mismatch" between procedural OO programming languages and declarative
>>>databases (by making the databases less declarative). What is the
>>>motivation now?
>>
>>I'm not sure I understand. Whose motivation? For what?

> > The motivation for studying network databases under a new name, even > with different languages.

It provides you with a higher-level data model. Moreover, it has slowly
begun to dawn on people that the big advantages of the relational model
(simplicity, formal basis, data-independence, declarativity, etc.) are
actually also easiliy achieved in other data models. There's nothing
special about the relational model in that respect.